FREE ESSAY ON BAY OF PIGS

BAY OF PIGS

The story of the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs is one of mismanagement,
overconfidence, and lack of security. The blame for the failure of the operation falls
directly in the lap of the Central Intelligence Agency and a young president and his
advisors. The fall out from the invasion caused a rise in tension between the two great
superpowers and ironically 34 years after the event, the person that the invasion meant
to topple, Fidel Castro, is still in power. To understand the origins of the invasion and
its ramifications for the future it is first necessary to look at the invasion and its
origins.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, started a few days before on April 15th with the
bombing of Cuba by what appeared to be defecting Cuban air force pilots. At 6 a.m. in the
morning of that Saturday, three Cuban military bases were bombed by B-26 bombers. The
airfields at Camp Libertad, San Antonio de los Ba?os and Antonio Maceo airport at
Santiago de Cuba were fired upon. Seven people were killed at Libertad and forty-seven
people were killed at other sites on the island.
Two of the B-26s left Cuba and flew to Miami, apparently to defect to the United States.
The Cuban Revolutionary Council, the government in exile, in New York City released a
statement saying that the bombings in Cuba were . . . carried out by 'Cubans inside Cuba'
who were 'in contact with' the top command of the Revolutionary Council . . . . The New
York Times reporter covering the story alluded to something being wrong with the whole
situation when he wondered how the council knew the pilots were coming if the pilots had
only decided to leave Cuba on Thursday after  . . . a suspected betrayal by a fellow
pilot had precipitated a plot to strike.
. . . Whatever the case, the planes came down in Miami later that morning, one landed at
Key West Naval Air Station at 7:00 a.m. and the other at Miami International Airport at
8:20 a.m. Both planes were badly damaged and their tanks were nearly empty. On the front
page of The New York Times the next day, a picture of one of the B-26s was shown along
with a picture of one of the pilots cloaked in a baseball hat and hiding behind dark
sunglasses, his name was withheld. A sense of conspiracy was even at this early stage
beginning to envelope the events of that week.
In the early hours of April 17th the assault on the Bay of Pigs began. In the true cloak
and dagger spirit of a movie, the assault began at 2 a.m. with a team of frogmen going
ashore with orders to set up landing lights to indicate to the main assault force the
precise location of their objectives, as well as to clear the area of anything that may
impede the main landing teams 2:30 a.m. and at 3:00 a.m. two battalions came ashore at
Playa Girўn and one battalion at Playa Larga beaches. The troops at Playa
Girўn had orders to move west, northwest, up the coast and meet with the troops at
Playa Larga in the middle of the bay. A small group of men were then to be sent north to
the town of Jaguey Grande to secure it as well.
When looking at a modern map of Cuba it is obvious that the troops would have problems in
the area that was chosen for them to land at. The area around the Bay of Pigs is a swampy
marsh land area which would be hard on the troops. The Cuban forces were quick to react
and Castro ordered his T-33 trainer jets, two Sea Furies, and two B-26s into the air to
stop the invading forces. Off the coast was the command and control ship and another
vessel carrying supplies for the invading forces. The Cuban air force made quick work of
the supply ships, sinking the command vessel the Marsopa and the supply ship the Houston,
blasting them to pieces with five-inch rockets. In the end the 5th battalion was lost,
which was on the Houston, as well as the supplies for the landing teams and eight other
smaller vessels. With some of the invading forces' ships destroyed, and no command and
control ship, the logistics of the operation soon broke down as the other supply ships
were kept at bay by Casto's air force. As with many failed military adventures, one of
the problems with this one was with supplying the troops.
In the air, Castro had easily won superiority over the invading force. His fast moving
T-33s, although unimpressive by today's standards, made short work of the slow moving
B-26s of the invading force. On Tuesday, two were shot out of the sky and by Wednesday
the invaders had lost 10 of their 12 aircraft. With air power firmly in control of
Castro's forces, the end was near for the invading army.
Over the 72 hours the invading force of about 1500 men were pounded by the Cubans. Casto
fired 122mm. Howitzers, 22mm. cannon, and tank fire at them. By Wednesday the invaders
were pushed back to their landing zone at Playa Girўn. Surrounded by Castro's
forces some began to surrender while others fled into the hills. In total 114 men were
killed in the slaughter while thirty-six died as prisoners in Cuban cells. Others were to
live out twenty years or more in those cells as men plotting to topple the government of
Castro. The 1500 men of the invading force never had a chance for success from almost the
first days in the planning stage of the operation. Operation Pluto, as it came to be
known as, has its origins in the last dying days of the Eisenhower administration and
that murky time period during the transition of power to the newly elected president John
F. Kennedy.
The origins of American policy in Latin America in the late 1950s and early 1960s has its
origins in American's economic interests and its anticommunist policies in the region.
The same man who had helped formulate American containment policy towards the Soviet
threat, George Kennan, in 1950 spoke to US Chiefs of Mission in Rio de Janeiro about
Latin America..
By the 1950s trade with Latin America accounted for a quarter of American exports, and 80
per cent of the investment in Latin America was also American. The Americans had a vested
interest in the region that it would remain pro-American.
The Guatemalan adventure can be seen as another of the factors that lead the American
government to believe that it could handle Casto. Before the Second World War ended, a
coup in Guatemala saw the rise to power of Juan Jose Ar‚valo. He was not a
communist in the traditional sense of the term, but he . . . packed his government with
Communist Party members and Communist sympathizers. In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz succeeded
Ar‚valo after an election in March of that year. The party had been progressing
with a series of reforms, and the newly elected leader continued with these reforms.
During land reforms a major American company, the United Fruit Company, lost its land and
other holdings without any compensation from the Guatemalan government. When the
Guatemalans refused to go to the International Court of Law, United Fruit began to lobby
the government of the United States to take action. In the government they had some very
powerful supporters. Among them were Foster Dulles, Secretary of State who had once been
their lawyer, his brother Allen the Director of Central Intelligence who was a share
holder, and Robert Cutler head of the National Security Council. In what was a clear
conflict of interest, the security apparatus of the United States decided to take action
against the Guatemalans.
From May 1st, 1954, to June 18th, the Central Intelligence Agency did everything in its
power to overthrow the government of Arbenz. On June 17th to the 18th, it peaked with an
invasion of 450 men lead by a Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. With the help of air support
the men took control of the country and Arbenz fled to the Mexican Embassy. By June 27th,
the country was firmly in control of the invading force. With its success in Guatemala,
CIA had the confidence that it could now take on anyone who interfered with American
interests.
Castro overthrew Batista in 1959. Originally Castro was not a communist either and even
had meetings with then Vice-President Richard Nixon. Fearful of Castro's revolution,
people with money, like doctors, lawyers, and the mafia, left Cuba for the United States.
To prevent the loss of more capital Castro's solution was to nationalize some of the
businesses in Cuba. In the process of nationalizing some business he came into conflict
with American interests just as Arbenz had in Guatemala. . . . legitimate U.S. Businesses
were taken over, and the process of socialization begun with little if any talk of
compensation. There were also rumours of Cuban involvement in trying to invade Panama,
Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic and by this time Castro had been turn down by the
United States for any economic aid. Being rejected by the Americans, he met with foreign
minister Anasta Mikoyan to secure a $100 million loan from the Soviet Union. It was in
this atmosphere that the American Intelligence and Foreign Relations communities decided
that Castro was leaning towards communism and had to be dealt with.
In the spring of 1960, President Eisenhower approved a plan to send small groups of
American trained, Cuban exiles, to work in the underground as guerrillas to overthrow
Castro. By the fall, the plan was changed to a full invasion with air support by exile
Cubans in American supplied planes. The original group was to be trained in Panama, but
with the growth of the operation and the quickening pace of events in Cuba, it was
decided to move things to a base in Guatemala..
It was now fall and a new president had been elected. President Kennedy could have
stopped the invasion if he wanted to, but he probably didn't do so for several reasons.
Firstly, he had campaigned for some form of action against Cuba and it was also the
height of the cold war, to back out now would mean having groups of Cuban exiles
travelling around the globe saying how the Americans had backed down on the Cuba issue.
In competition with the Soviet Union, backing out would make the Americans look like
wimps on the international scene, and for domestic consumption the new president would be
seen as backing away from one of his campaign promises. The second reason Kennedy
probably didn't abort the operation is the main reason why the operation failed, problems
with the CIA.
The failure at the CIA led to Kennedy making poor decisions, which would affect future
relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union. The failure at CIA had three causes. First the
wrong people were handling the operation, secondly the agency in charge of the operation
was also the one providing all the intelligence for the operation, and thirdly for an
organization supposedly obsessed with security the operation had security problems.
National Estimates could have provided information on the situation in Cuba and the
chances for an uprising against Castro once the invasion started. Also kept out of the
loop were the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff who could have provided help
on the military side of the adventure. In the end, the CIA kept all the information for
itself and passed on to the president only what it thought he should see. Lucien S.
Vandenbroucke, in Political Science Quarterly of 1984, based his analysis of the Bay of
Pigs failure on organizational behaviour theory. 
For an organization that deals with security issues, the CIA's lack of security in the
Bay of Pigs operation is ironic. Security began to break down before the invasion when
The New York Times reporter Tad Szulc . . . learned of Operation Pluto from Cuban
friends. . . earlier that year while in Costa Rica covering an Organization of American
States meeting.
The conclusion one can draw from the articles in The New York Times is that if reporters
knew the whole story by the 22nd, it can be expected that Castro's intelligence service
and that of the Soviet Union knew about the planned invasion as well. 
In the administration itself, the Bay of Pigs crisis lead to a few changes. Firstly,
someone had to take the blame for the affair and, as Director of Central Intelligence,
Allen Dulles was forced to resign and left CIA in November of 1961 Internally, the CIA
was never the same, although it continued with covert operations against Castro, it was
on a much reduced scale. According to a report of the Select Senate Committee on
Intelligence, future operations were . . . to nourish a spirit of resistance and
disaffection which could lead to significant defections and other by-products of unrest.
The CIA also now came under the supervision of the president's brother Bobby, the
Attorney General. According to Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, the outcome of the Bay of Pigs
failure also made the White House suspicious of an operation that everyone agreed to,
made them less reluctant to question the experts, and made them play devil's advocates
when questioning them. In the end, the lessons learned from the Bay of Pigs failure may
have contributed to the successful handling of the Cuban missile crisis that followed.
The long-term ramifications of the Bay of Pigs invasion are a little harder to assess.
The ultimate indication of the invasions failure is that thirty-four years later Castro
is still in power. This not only indicates the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, but
American policy towards Cuba in general. The American policy, rather than undermining
Castro's support, has probably contributed to it. As with many wars, even a cold one, the
leader is able to rally his people around him against an aggressor.
Bibliography 
Fedarko, Kevin. Bereft of Patrons, Desperate to Rescue his Economy, 
Fidel Turns to an Unusual Solution: Capitalism. Time Magazine, week of 
February 20th, 1995. Internet, http://www.timeinc.com, 1995. 
Meyer, Karl E. and Szulc, Tad. The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle 
of a Disaster. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1962 and 1968. 
Mosley, Leonard. Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John 
Foster Dulles and their Family Network. New York: The Dail Press/James Wade, 1978. 
Prados, John. Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert 
Operations Since World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. 
Ranelagh, John. CIA: A History. London: BBC Books, 1992. 
Bibliography
The story of the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs is one of mismanagement,
overconfidence, and lack of security. The blame for the failure of the operation falls
directly in the lap of the Central Intelligence Agency and a young president and his
advisors. The fall out from the invasion caused a rise in tension between the two great
superpowers and ironically 34 years after the event, the person that the invasion meant
to topple, Fidel Castro, is still in power. To understand the origins of the invasion and
its ramifications for the future it is first necessary to look at the invasion and its
origins.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, started a few days before on April 15th with the
bombing of Cuba by what appeared to be defecting Cuban air force pilots. At 6 a.m. in the
morning of that Saturday, three Cuban military bases were bombed by B-26 bombers. The
airfields at Camp Libertad, San Antonio de los Ba?os and Antonio Maceo airport at
Santiago de Cuba were fired upon. Seven people were killed at Libertad and forty-seven
people were killed at other sites on the island.
Two of the B-26s left Cuba and flew to Miami, apparently to defect to the United States.
The Cuban Revolutionary Council, the government in exile, in New York City released a
statement saying that the bombings in Cuba were . . . carried out by 'Cubans inside Cuba'
who were 'in contact with' the top command of the Revolutionary Council . . . . The New
York Times reporter covering the story alluded to something being wrong with the whole
situation when he wondered how the council knew the pilots were coming if the pilots had
only decided to leave Cuba on Thursday after  . . . a suspected betrayal by a fellow
pilot had precipitated a plot to strike.
. . . Whatever the case, the planes came down in Miami later that morning, one landed at
Key West Naval Air Station at 7:00 a.m. and the other at Miami International Airport at
8:20 a.m. Both planes were badly damaged and their tanks were nearly empty. On the front
page of The New York Times the next day, a picture of one of the B-26s was shown along
with a picture of one of the pilots cloaked in a baseball hat and hiding behind dark
sunglasses, his name was withheld. A sense of conspiracy was even at this early stage
beginning to envelope the events of that week.
In the early hours of April 17th the assault on the Bay of Pigs began. In the true cloak
and dagger spirit of a movie, the assault began at 2 a.m. with a team of frogmen going
ashore with orders to set up landing lights to indicate to the main assault force the
precise location of their objectives, as well as to clear the area of anything that may
impede the main landing teams 2:30 a.m. and at 3:00 a.m. two battalions came ashore at
Playa Girўn and one battalion at Playa Larga beaches. The troops at Playa
Girўn had orders to move west, northwest, up the coast and meet with the troops at
Playa Larga in the middle of the bay. A small group of men were then to be sent north to
the town of Jaguey Grande to secure it as well.
When looking at a modern map of Cuba it is obvious that the troops would have problems in
the area that was chosen for them to land at. The area around the Bay of Pigs is a swampy
marsh land area which would be hard on the troops. The Cuban forces were quick to react
and Castro ordered his T-33 trainer jets, two Sea Furies, and two B-26s into the air to
stop the invading forces. Off the coast was the command and control ship and another
vessel carrying supplies for the invading forces. The Cuban air force made quick work of
the supply ships, sinking the command vessel the Marsopa and the supply ship the Houston,
blasting them to pieces with five-inch rockets. In the end the 5th battalion was lost,
which was on the Houston, as well as the supplies for the landing teams and eight other
smaller vessels. With some of the invading forces' ships destroyed, and no command and
control ship, the logistics of the operation soon broke down as the other supply ships
were kept at bay by Casto's air force. As with many failed military adventures, one of
the problems with this one was with supplying the troops.
In the air, Castro had easily won superiority over the invading force. His fast moving
T-33s, although unimpressive by today's standards, made short work of the slow moving
B-26s of the invading force. On Tuesday, two were shot out of the sky and by Wednesday
the invaders had lost 10 of their 12 aircraft. With air power firmly in control of
Castro's forces, the end was near for the invading army.
Over the 72 hours the invading force of about 1500 men were pounded by the Cubans. Casto
fired 122mm. Howitzers, 22mm. cannon, and tank fire at them. By Wednesday the invaders
were pushed back to their landing zone at Playa Girўn. Surrounded by Castro's
forces some began to surrender while others fled into the hills. In total 114 men were
killed in the slaughter while thirty-six died as prisoners in Cuban cells. Others were to
live out twenty years or more in those cells as men plotting to topple the government of
Castro. The 1500 men of the invading force never had a chance for success from almost the
first days in the planning stage of the operation. Operation Pluto, as it came to be
known as, has its origins in the last dying days of the Eisenhower administration and
that murky time period during the transition of power to the newly elected president John
F. Kennedy.
The origins of American policy in Latin America in the late 1950s and early 1960s has its
origins in American's economic interests and its anticommunist policies in the region.
The same man who had helped formulate American containment policy towards the Soviet
threat, George Kennan, in 1950 spoke to US Chiefs of Mission in Rio de Janeiro about
Latin America..
By the 1950s trade with Latin America accounted for a quarter of American exports, and 80
per cent of the investment in Latin America was also American. The Americans had a vested
interest in the region that it would remain pro-American.
The Guatemalan adventure can be seen as another of the factors that lead the American
government to believe that it could handle Casto. Before the Second World War ended, a
coup in Guatemala saw the rise to power of Juan Jose Ar‚valo. He was not a
communist in the traditional sense of the term, but he . . . packed his government with
Communist Party members and Communist sympathizers. In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz succeeded
Ar‚valo after an election in March of that year. The party had been progressing
with a series of reforms, and the newly elected leader continued with these reforms.
During land reforms a major American company, the United Fruit Company, lost its land and
other holdings without any compensation from the Guatemalan government. When the
Guatemalans refused to go to the International Court of Law, United Fruit began to lobby
the government of the United States to take action. In the government they had some very
powerful supporters. Among them were Foster Dulles, Secretary of State who had once been
their lawyer, his brother Allen the Director of Central Intelligence who was a share
holder, and Robert Cutler head of the National Security Council. In what was a clear
conflict of interest, the security apparatus of the United States decided to take action
against the Guatemalans.
From May 1st, 1954, to June 18th, the Central Intelligence Agency did everything in its
power to overthrow the government of Arbenz. On June 17th to the 18th, it peaked with an
invasion of 450 men lead by a Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. With the help of air support
the men took control of the country and Arbenz fled to the Mexican Embassy. By June 27th,
the country was firmly in control of the invading force. With its success in Guatemala,
CIA had the confidence that it could now take on anyone who interfered with American
interests.
Castro overthrew Batista in 1959. Originally Castro was not a communist either and even
had meetings with then Vice-President Richard Nixon. Fearful of Castro's revolution,
people with money, like doctors, lawyers, and the mafia, left Cuba for the United States.
To prevent the loss of more capital Castro's solution was to nationalize some of the
businesses in Cuba. In the process of nationalizing some business he came into conflict
with American interests just as Arbenz had in Guatemala. . . . legitimate U.S. Businesses
were taken over, and the process of socialization begun with little if any talk of
compensation. There were also rumours of Cuban involvement in trying to invade Panama,
Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic and by this time Castro had been turn down by the
United States for any economic aid. Being rejected by the Americans, he met with foreign
minister Anasta Mikoyan to secure a $100 million loan from the Soviet Union. It was in
this atmosphere that the American Intelligence and Foreign Relations communities decided
that Castro was leaning towards communism and had to be dealt with.
In the spring of 1960, President Eisenhower approved a plan to send small groups of
American trained, Cuban exiles, to work in the underground as guerrillas to overthrow
Castro. By the fall, the plan was changed to a full invasion with air support by exile
Cubans in American supplied planes. The original group was to be trained in Panama, but
with the growth of the operation and the quickening pace of events in Cuba, it was
decided to move things to a base in Guatemala..
It was now fall and a new president had been elected. President Kennedy could have
stopped the invasion if he wanted to, but he probably didn't do so for several reasons.
Firstly, he had campaigned for some form of action against Cuba and it was also the
height of the cold war, to back out now would mean having groups of Cuban exiles
travelling around the globe saying how the Americans had backed down on the Cuba issue.
In competition with the Soviet Union, backing out would make the Americans look like
wimps on the international scene, and for domestic consumption the new president would be
seen as backing away from one of his campaign promises. The second reason Kennedy
probably didn't abort the operation is the main reason why the operation failed, problems
with the CIA.
The failure at the CIA led to Kennedy making poor decisions, which would affect future
relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union. The failure at CIA had three causes. First the
wrong people were handling the operation, secondly the agency in charge of the operation
was also the one providing all the intelligence for the operation, and thirdly for an
organization supposedly obsessed with security the operation had security problems.
National Estimates could have provided information on the situation in Cuba and the
chances for an uprising against Castro once the invasion started. Also kept out of the
loop were the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff who could have provided help
on the military side of the adventure. In the end, the CIA kept all the information for
itself and passed on to the president only what it thought he should see. Lucien S.
Vandenbroucke, in Political Science Quarterly of 1984, based his analysis of the Bay of
Pigs failure on organizational behaviour theory. 
For an organization that deals with security issues, the CIA's lack of security in the
Bay of Pigs operation is ironic. Security began to break down before the invasion when
The New York Times reporter Tad Szulc . . . learned of Operation Pluto from Cuban
friends. . . earlier that year while in Costa Rica covering an Organization of American
States meeting.
The conclusion one can draw from the articles in The New York Times is that if reporters
knew the whole story by the 22nd, it can be expected that Castro's intelligence service
and that of the Soviet Union knew about the planned invasion as well. 
In the administration itself, the Bay of Pigs crisis lead to a few changes. Firstly,
someone had to take the blame for the affair and, as Director of Central Intelligence,
Allen Dulles was forced to resign and left CIA in November of 1961 Internally, the CIA
was never the same, although it continued with covert operations against Castro, it was
on a much reduced scale. According to a report of the Select Senate Committee on
Intelligence, future operations were . . . to nourish a spirit of resistance and
disaffection which could lead to significant defections and other by-products of unrest.
The CIA also now came under the supervision of the president's brother Bobby, the
Attorney General. According to Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, the outcome of the Bay of Pigs
failure also made the White House suspicious of an operation that everyone agreed to,
made them less reluctant to question the experts, and made them play devil's advocates
when questioning them. In the end, the lessons learned from the Bay of Pigs failure may
have contributed to the successful handling of the Cuban missile crisis that followed.
The long-term ramifications of the Bay of Pigs invasion are a little harder to assess.
The ultimate indication of the invasions failure is that thirty-four years later Castro
is still in power. This not only indicates the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, but
American policy towards Cuba in general. The American policy, rather than undermining
Castro's support, has probably contributed to it. As with many wars, even a cold one, the
leader is able to rally his people around him against an aggressor.
Bibliography 
Fedarko, Kevin. Bereft of Patrons, Desperate to Rescue his Economy, 
Fidel Turns to an Unusual Solution: Capitalism. Time Magazine, week of 
February 20th, 1995. Internet, http://www.timeinc.com, 1995. 
Meyer, Karl E. and Szulc, Tad. The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle 
of a Disaster. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1962 and 1968. 
Mosley, Leonard. Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John 
Foster Dulles and their Family Network. New York: The Dail Press/James Wade, 1978. 
Prados, John. Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert 
Operations Since World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. 
Ranelagh, John. CIA: A History. London: BBC Books, 1992.